Greg Oden is playing basketball again, and now he's facing Jimmer Fredette in The Basketball Tournament

Greg Oden vs. Jimmer Fredette will be quite nostalgic for some college basketball fans. (AP Photos)

The pro careers of Greg Oden and Jimmer Fredette didn’t work out for very different reasons, but both were disappointing given college careers that were successful also for very different reasons.

Oden in particularly remains one of the NBA’s sadder stories in the long history of draft busts. One of the most talented big men college basketball has ever seen, the seven-footer carried Ohio State to the NCAA Tournament final as a freshman and was hyped as a generational NBA prospect, even more so than a young Kevin Durant.

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That hype did not work out. Instead, injury after injury swallowed Oden’s career and saw him appear in just 105 career games. He eventually retired from the NBA in 2016.

Greg Oden vs. Jimmer Fredette

Oden’s next challenge will be a game that any college basketball fan should have circled on their calendar. Team Fredette, led by the former unanimous national player of the year, awaits in the Tournament’s Super 16.

Fredette’s NBA career never took off like some fans imagined; the NBA was much better equipped than college teams to handle Fredette, a pure scorer with a shot selection that would make Steph Curry blush. The BYU great averaged just 6.0 points in his NBA career and, five years after being drafted 10th overall by the Kings in the 2011 NBA draft, he had landed with the Shanghai Sharks of the Chinese Basketball Association.

The Scarlet & Gray figure to enter Sunday as the favorite as the bracket’s No. 1 seed, but who knows what could happen in a game featuring two of college basketball’s most disruptive players in recent history.